the things that are illegible or the things you actually want because there's mystery in them if I can really surprise you about something by most of the way to selling you something like the mystery that makes the sales process worthwhile right without mystery there is no margin the guys who do really well tend to be the 2 and2 guides who are
deeply mysterious like here is the pain points we're soling you and here is how much money it's costing you and here is how much you earn by using our product and then there's the counter thing which is like this product feels nice it is aesthetically beautiful you like it for reasons you have a hard time putting
your finger on the great thing about Silicon Valley is also the great thing that sort of holds it back in these powerful ways which is that it's a bunch of nerds that don't understand Aesthetics except for handful of them really do understand Aesthetics and then they win well hello everyone it's Jim oan see with yet another infinite loops
I was uaing my potentially recurring guest before we began recording I'm not a potentially recurring guest I'm a kinetically recurring guest Alex Dano my friend and inhibitable philosopher of basically all things I I I could throw virtually anything at you and you can talk about it you can like you are amazing because
like give you a mic you go 30 minutes out anything which I love and we' experimented quite a bit in the past uh and this time around same deal I haven't really prepared at all I was gleeful when I saw yesterday that you were going to be my conversant today Alex you uh well for people who don't know Alex uh I
think we are creating a complex adaptive system here with all of the podcasts that is going to make an emergent amazing maybe even bestelling book with all of the things that we have discussed in the past Alex is the director of product at Shopify not Spotify right not Spotify that's correct Shopify one of these one
of these days get it clean and and so I'm I'm just gonna jump right in and it's am I what the [ __ ] is going on like what the [ __ ] I was rereading one of my favorite science fiction books called the fifth science and they've got a passage in there that I want to read to you and and then we will discuss in in
in the book he says we call it narrative collapse when a planet gets so connected basically a Time inevitably arrives where it becomes really difficult to work out what is actually happening video audio can be fake testimony is unreliable all truths fall into a relative flatness okay this is this is a this is a good promx for me to bring up one of
my great grievances of the past couple months uh and this is surely something that you have some opinions about I genuinely don't know which side of the fence you're on on this um so I'd like to know Jim are you Pro or are you anti hiding likes on Twitter oh was it a good move or was it a bad move wow I had even
even can I'll connect this to your question in a second but I want to know where you stand on issue connect it to my question but I am like like Patrick used to joke I ruin every sample survey that I get put into because like I don't you don't ruin the sample surveys you just respond to it with gifts I I Alex I literally do not care
nor know how I I know how many followers I have I have no idea who is following me nor do I care um I I I I never respond like two likes nice fine but so is it good or bad well well I think on the good side it allows people who are always worried and terrified what other people will think of them right to to stop falsifying their preferences and
actually you know like get material that might uh put them in a class of citizenry uh that might be in the basket of deplorables or the you know uh that type thing I by the way I think one of the one of the funniest things Elon could do would be to turn likes back on that's the big joke right everybody was like one day you just turn
it back on again yeah it's it's the Twitter version of the um uh of in the office when Jim starts adding nickolls into Dwight's phone handset one at a time every day it's like one day I took them all out so so uh again yeah I mean like I I don't really care I mean that's my that's my answer I I I don't I don't
know I will look to you to educate me on whether it was a good thing or a bad thing sure okay so first let me connect why I asked you this question oh this question back to your question about narrative collapse so when we think about this idea of like hey what does anybody even think is real anymore like what is what is the actual true
narrative versus what is sort of these kind of like reflexively created narrative that can be you know deep faked into existence ored into existence or whatever it's like okay if you if you if you if you take Twitter I refuse to call it X because I don't know about you but like it's Twitter come on I always
call it Twitter you take Twitter as sort of like this little microcosm of the world saying like listen like here is this nice little terrarium where you can observe like what what what is the discourse um to me the like the single greatest signal of like who was really caring about what was not the hard feed of posts and retweets it was the soft
signal of being able to piece together these breadcrumbs of seeing which people liked what thing because this gave you a very um a a a a um a trail of breadcrumbs that you the the the Twitter user needed to piece together to figure out what people were thinking and what people thought were funny right and what
the joke is like Twitter is basically a format for discourse where the native unit of content is like the joke and the main character right we've talked about this before right it's like every day on Twitter there's a main character and every day on Twitter there is a joke and the way that you consume the format is
you rarely see the joke first you see the reactions to the joke first then you have to go figure out okay what is the joke that we're all making today or you see people making fun of the main character but you don't know who it is then you have to go it's like you have to go do the work of like back propagating to find out who we're all
making fun of today right this incredible format and the reason why I I bring this up is like that act of back propagation of deriving the main character and deriving the joke is an incredibly Bottoms Up way of maintaining the Integrity of real narratives right because the narrative is built continuously by people it is not
something that is made and then put out into the world and then commented on the act of commenting it is what makes it in the first place right it's the action is the content distilled down to its purest form now what has really irked me about removing likes not removing likes I should say making likes private is it
removed one of the main ways by which that rebuilding of the story continuously happened right it's like hey like here's here's the imagine some like you know like so so someone makes a JD Vance joke right and then there are a million riffs off the joke and when one of those riffs might get likes from these five people that like you seeing the like of
the Tweet making fun of the joke is a reconstruction of the joke right that happens in through your the reader's mind right each time right it makes the thing new which in fact is like this is how our brains actually work right you are not consuming reality right you are consuming a construct that you are
making all the time and Twitter mirrored that thing really perfectly when you take out that key signal of these people liked the tweet that made fun of this joke that referenced that person right you're left with something that is really like dumbed down to lowest common denominator in a weird way it's just sort of like bulk likes which is like
less interesting now the the the converse to that of course is this very very real thing you identified which is preference falsification right this is like yes of course there is this human nature to like not actually like what you like and not actually say what you're really thinking but like I'm not convinced that it was worth the cost
here like it seems like a really hand fisted way to approach that um as opposed to um the the real service that likes we're doing and I say that as overall like a I'm not like a hater of like how elon's been running Twitter um I think that Community notes is one of the most successful products of the last
decade it is unbelievably good holy [ __ ] right it's like it's like yeah like that product has earned so much Goodwill from a like it is TR working at something very difficult then like look clearly like I think this team has a set of principles over how they want this network to work this sort of pulsating
massive story but I think that like hiding likes really did a lot of damage to people's ability to not only reconstruct the joke as is being generated all day but also construct who should I be following right who should like what what what threads should I be in the future anticipating to pull on because that's how you construct a
really great experience right I think it must be miserable for something starting out on Twitter today if there even are such people right it's like how do you know how to get into this it's like the the public likes were a really great way to start and so it's I'm sad that's gone yeah that's my that's my I like the
take um I especially as you know I don't watch live TV I don't watch sports and yet I know through the memes about the Australian B break dancer because like they were some of the best [ __ ] memes I laughed out loud into to to your point I had to figure out when I saw the first one which was Breaking Bad you know it was the the TV
poster for the show Breaking Bad and it's got them on top and then it has her I just laughed immediately and I'm like I wonder what this is about and so it did drive me to go find her Elaine uh Bennis version of break dancing right yeah so yeah like it is really in that that format of like explicitly rederiving the original Topic in the
minds of the consumers is how do put is do do do you think that this actually meaningfully varies by platform I guess it must I'm basically only on Twitter like I don't have I don't use Instagram or Tik Tok or any of those other things so I don't really know to what degree if at all like clearly like things go viral on Tik Tok
right it's like that just just as much if not more but I don't really know as a non-consumer like what the actual mechanism of this is like I know I know that like reactions are a big thing which Rings true to me um but I don't know like do you feel like your use of Twitter has changed meaningfully over time or do you use it the same way use
it exactly the same way I just sort of you know this two shell pass is usually my attitude about any changes again I'm I'm an anomaly in that I really don't give a [ __ ] as long as uh you can pretty much say whatever you want and we're going to get to that in a minute uh I I I really don't like the uh I I wish
there was some way to verify a person's identity and yet coming from my previous background and asset management a a lot of compliance departments will not let really super smart people comment on social media and so most to financial asset management folks are Anonymous they're not Anonymous good ones are anous yeah all the good ones are
Anonymous now I know most of them because I reach out and figure out who they are but the idea that um you know the the the trolls and Bots you know I ignore them but I know that other people get really worked up about Paul Graham tweeted yesterday something I paraphrasing this saying in a butcher basically like I bet there
will be a next wave of social networks where suppressing troll ship is actually like built into the architecture in the first place much in the way that you have like secure operating systems right as opposed to the open and vulnerable ones um perhaps that's true I have a hard time imagining how you would do that in
any way that would still make it meaningfully open right I think it's like my my other response to that is like I think in practice that like exists today it's called like Instagram and threads mostly right like like yeah you I guess that's not that's not built into the social network itself so much as that just like Works du to sort of like very
very heavy moderation like as a as a as a culture and in the business um which is no mean feat right it is it is hard to actually accomplish um you know the the that that t Team over at met has clearly like decided that moderation is the product um and they have succeeded at it accordingly so I'm gonna move on to to
the intent of the first question so like as an old right if if the following things it happened when I was say 2530 right if if a sitting president of the United States had to be hounded out of seeking reelection by his governing party and was replaced by his vice president who let's be let's be real here prior
like she she didn't get much love from either Biden his administration anyone uh or anyone right and and and so that that has happened and where are the news people where is Sam Donaldson shouting at the press secretary every morning why AR you invoking the 25th Amendment if he can't if you can't run how come you're not I
mean it seems to me that our corporate media has kind of just gone like where are the let let me let me leave it here where are the journalists the and which I love I love real journalists I.E you know oh something happened over at the Watergate we might want to look into that um did you ever watch Silicon
Valley the show yes of course like oh oh these aren't real journalists these are Tech journalists you think one of them is going to go to jail to protect a source for Tech crunch um anyway back to back to your question so all right I don't have I don't know to what degree um uh uh CNN or fox or any of those people were in fact putting up any
characters to say those things every day I think to me right as a person who gets their news from Twitter I feel like the main way in which I encounter like specifically like where's 25th M who's going to do it is sort of like characters like David saaks um you get like there have been some characters that have
really D David saxs in particular man' do you remember that really good week on Twitter where it's like not only did we get um hey he about this guy JD Vance he gets home from work on the couch has a headache uh not only do we get that uh and we got but we got the whole like um all of Valley piles on David Sachs all
at once uh and it was really spectacular uh not just the like all Graham being like uh uh like hey buddy do you want people to actually know what happened uh not only that but then also when sax spoke at the RNC and it was like crickets and some isolated booze or whatever for whatever he was saying about Ukraine I can't remember I can't
remember what the content was it doesn't matter what remembers is the reaction to the content which is not whatever he said not even the reaction at the convention which was crickets but then uh uh him tweeting where he was like nobody booed some people clapped actually it's like by Buddy never tweet those words PPR fail
101 nobody booed some people clapped actually is uh one of one of the great on liners uh of course it's like you know like he's he's he's he's obviously him him and then jamaat and the Allin guys so figure clearly figured out a formula that works uh so you can't you can't slag it too badly but also it's like man that was funny what a great
week that I tweeted out that week I was like Twitter's so back right and I it's like it it really feels like it's sort of back to the um that manic energy that was sort of like pulsing with like 2013 14 15 that period of time there are some flavors of that that are back yeah but I'm going to continue to dri
until you like give me give me an answer that doesn't be just Twitter like Training 101 don't answer the question just whatever of course I remember that yeah I that I mean how do you think I made it through being in the media all those years I completely ignored the question and then answered the one I wanted to yeah but seriously like and
and and I I I mean this objectively or I don't care what your political beliefs are right so if you are an investigative journalist who is on the left or you are an investigative journalist who's on the right or maybe I it might be like the rarest thing in the world an investigative journalist who is neither
of the left or the right it just wants to figure [ __ ] out like what where are they it seems to me that like I I to to announce what a nerd I was as a child uh like during the summer of the Watergate earrings I was what 13 like dude that's all I did all I did was watch those earings because you know as they they were riveting and it just
seems to me that like everything seems airs sets everything seems like a poin Village well part of here's where I think you actually get some pretty radical um departures on each side of certainly the American political Spectrum in so far as like the the the DNC right now or Democrats right now sort of like Peak demonstration of
you know like you know the meme of Nancy Pelosi on the phone that originally was like buy these Nvidia calls or whatever but has since been has since been used all across the board right it's like you have that level of uh um um xiin ping style party control of like we're going to orchestrate the meetings
such do you remember remember when that poor guy got like taken off uh in the National like in the in the Chinese the the I'm going to butcher exactly what this was it was a couple years back he had one sort of main like opposition leader um and like during the main Congress of everybody getting in it's like they got the Camas to point righted
him in the middle of a speech and then a bunch of people ushered him off stage and then he was like not see from again it's like okay like you're you're clear it's like it's like if um they're basically doing it's like hey like apparently the people want there to be a deep State let's give him some deep State and then
on on the on the other side you have like the phenomenon of sort of like the Arrested Development sketch type Trump family is back and it's going to be Kimberly gilfoil as Secretary of State and it's going to be you know this incredibly rag tag Sho string thing trying to just keep alive the Ember of this feeling of can Trump still
successfully do stand up to a crowd or has he lost the Mojo right wherein it's like in either case this concept of conventional journalism is sort of uh made a mockery of because in the in the the the the Democrat case it's like oh you don't have ACC to what's really going on so like you only reporting on
surface level symptoms in the sort of Republican case it's like the surface level symptoms are actually not only is that literally like all there is to it but it's like they're all there is to it in this sort of almost like like it's it's all parity at this point of self-referential parity and so it's like the act of reporting on it like ruins
the like it it sort of it collapses The Narrative um yeah there's your narrative thought for it sort of collapses the ability of the magic to work anymore and I think this is part of why you see all this sort of sputtering frustration out of like the past okay when when was when was Biden stepping down also by the way back to
your previous idea stepping down via a screenshot of a letter posted on Twitter by the Twitter intern or whatever it's like man uh but and and then you hit on it right like in earlier eras the eyebrows would have all been you know permanently like what the [ __ ] well and they were like I I remember like in the 48 hours after
Biden posted the letter a fair amount of my feed certainly was like hey so did the intern get a little uh Power drunk or something like what's going on here like do we know he posted this the intern is like oh I'll do it myself godamn it do you remember so do you remember um there was maybe a 36 hour story arc that it was um the Obamas
who were doing who were sort of like Master choreographing before we settled on like no no no it was Nancy come on come on um we they decided she was the superior meme for the format um but like that was the really big like um like it was it was always Brock all along like he was always the one that controlled the the Twitter account
like he has the he had the keys to the OCTA account like I just love this idea of like I forget somebody posted this idea where it's like hi Verizon I I lost my phone I need a new SIM card please my name is Joe Biden yep I'll hold please gate of birth is uh so you know stranger things have happened
[Laughter] so so yeah like of course they would of course they would that's the funny part um so I it's just like everything it because we're so connected right maybe what I hear you suggesting is that you have to develop you have to relearn how to follow the breadcrumbs you mentioned earlier right so you have to figure out okay so this
was odd it uh appeared on Twitter and it wasn't on presidential stationary and this this look things that make you go um but the thing that I find interesting is like let's not just keep picking on Biden I mean this is everywhere in politics doesn't matter what side of the aisle you happen to be on it's
everywhere happening the same way and and I'm just wondering like it first off does it need fixing you can say no if it doesn't or if it does need fixing how does that happen well let's see here so the thing that was so the thing that was so compelling about that month in there that we seem to now I think I think now we're kind of
past the month now it seems to be as like it's back to business as usual what was so compelling about it was um things were genuinely surprising right like yeah a actual surprise as The Meta character right that is the meta characteristic that is attractive about something or that is desirable about something is really
powerful um there's a study that came out a while ago which is um if you people were sort of screening various movies and then they put eye tracking things on people to look at where their where where where their eyes were focused and where their focus change over time as the screens on the movie changes and you can do all of this sort
of signal analysis on each pixel of the movie frame which is like hey like where do people actually look right what are the characteristics and especially in terms of like the information content as measured through like from an information Point Theory point of view and the answer is people don't look at the pixels where there is the most
uncertainty right they look at at the pixels where there's the most surprise right well that you know that's Claude Shannon's information theory in a nutshell right basically Shannon right what what he said was or it wasn't him but somebody's commenting on it was basically a political uh Speech has zero information because it has no no new or
surprising things a poem is just choca block full of information because people are surprised yeah so in in this case surprise is almost akin to like the first derivative of information um it's um like pure information interest isn't interesting either right it's like that's white noise right white noise is
pure information right what's interesting is uh sort of relative changes in information versus sameness uh is what is where signal is um this idea like surprise as being inherently how you sell things is something that I've been really interested in um because again like if you like what are elections elections
are a sales process right it's like you're trying to you're trying to do the there's an organized effort to sell a thing to a group right and there are competing processes and the better one wins right so through that like I've been really thinking a lot a lot about um did you ever did you read in the New York Times the other day there was this
great profile of Alex karp uh the paler CEO yeah um it included one of my favorite little L which I'd heard somewhere else but it was nice to see it again which is um one of the Peter teal lines which is like the Paradox of sales do you remember this um be do sales being if you're trying to sell something
you need to do two things simultaneously better in opposition to each other on the one hand you need the prospect to think this guy is just like me because that's how you build trust but on the other hand you need him to think this guy is completely different from me because that's how you get him to think that you have something he
doesn't right it's like and you need to impose both of these things at the same time it's like we're just like you except for I also have this mysterious reservoir of things from the Far East or whatever that contain mystery and therefore contain margin right without mystery there is no margin um and so how
do you do both of these things where it's like one of the ways that you see people do this successfully is being able to surprise people right like if I can really surprise you about something it's like I most of the way to selling you something um it's like if you look at in in certainly in in in in VC right this idea of like the two-way sale
between like a founder and an investor which is a bidirectional sales process it's like they're kind of both trying to do this dance wherein they both are like we are the same like we're a Founder friendly investment firm and like hey I have all these characteristics of all these Investments you were trying to
pattern match against but then also you need to have your angle where I'm like I'm going to tell you something that makes you completely rethink everything you've ever thought right about X right from which you derive like the mystery that makes the sales process worthwhile right because there's margin it anyway if you take this all sort of back to
elections right the sort of question that you're asking is like this is a large sales process that takes many months to complete right the way that you get people to sort of Quee into like you being the team that is selling something interesting right that I need to pay attention to that has mystery in it so again look at Trump 2016 candidacy
incredible on both dimensions right one we're just like you because we have all these hilarious you know every man flaws you know like that were that were made into spectacle um you know this man shits on a gold toilet seat wow he's just like me he also has no taste you know um but then also this idea of like oh my
God there is this dark mysterious Force here that I don't understand this is so compelling I need to vote for this right if not vote for it even this actually I think was particularly um true for the people who are like I will never vote for you you're repulsive was like I have to pay attention to you right which is
you know most of the battle and it's like nowadays you know like eight years later it's like man I feel like there's no mojo on either account now out of that team from what I see anyway it's like it's no longer an every man's story right because now it's sort of like retrenched to like we're going to get back but there's no mystery to it either
right like not not not especially like I feel like a lot of what they used to use like it's sort of been replaced by um I don't know how you play yeah like my my I'm not I'm not completely current up to date with like how things have shaken out going into the uh Democratic Convention but it feels like it's just
sort of turning into this sort of like generic back to the regular no surprises Slug It Out campaign type of thing uh certainly at least the Democrats would like to take it onto grounds where they can remove all the uncertainty out of it in sort of go play ground game which is like n that's boring though there's no good content
that yeah I I I don't know if that question at all but yeah no it that's what I love about you Alex actually is the fact that you sometimes when going out of your way not to answer my question you come up with Beauties like Mar there's only margin in mystery like I love that that's good I'm for sure our
producers are gonna pull that as a B book no doubt sure but you know you know what you know who I think said that originally just to add a little tie in there was actually Ryan Peterson from flexport um when he's talking about Freight forwarding right and people are like you lots of the how lots of software people be like this sounds like
a really low margin shitty stupid business that's done on pen and paper why do you think there's any money in this he's like because no one understands how this actually works right it's like there's so much mystery into it and it was like you know I I F I fell for the line anyway I thought it was a good line I don't know if it's
empirically true but who cares so actually I'll recover an old uh story when I was doing Asset Management I had a guy uh who was the consultant to one of our largest first we had a family that had uh sold their Enterprise to a big company and so they got a you shitload of money and my book what works on Wall Street had just come out and so
like literally he called me and he's like come out please you got to come to New Mexico but I really like your process blah blah blah anyway so my whole gig was complete transparency right we will show you every line of code that goes into the empirical uh algorithms that select the Securities etc etc and you know you you get to see
everything we in fact we even had a line we use a loose site box not a black box right and so anyway the consultant who follow about two years later we had a portfolio that was literally fire this is like the late 90s so you can guess what kind of portfolio it was it was pure Momo pure momentum yeah and it was
up triple digits going in to the end of 1999 and so this guy this guy says can I come by and see you I'm like sure and so he comes in he sits down he goes Jim I want to make you like a billionaire and there's one really simple thing you can do for that to happen and I'm like I'm all ears yeah and he goes make it a
black box make it a mystery he goes because without the mystery you're only going to yet like clients like the big client that I did retain who he was advising who was like a real Engineers mentality if I can't see you the way it's working I'm not gonna do it but that always struck me as something like was I ever a [ __ ] [ __ ] for not
taking his advice well there's there there's so much to this where this idea of um when does opacity make things better for everybody um but I feel like one of the classic examples is that like Vates ra has something about this where's like suppose you have a set you have a set of 10 friends in high school um that if
truth be told if everybody actually sat down you could rank them from one to 10 in coolness right it's like no one is ever going to do this though because it's everybody BEC worse off if you do this whereas like the Only Rule is that you have to know who is number one and you have to know who's number 10 right
it's always clear who the alpha of the group is and it's clear who the Court Jester is right but you two through eight have two through nine have to be a mystery um yeah and where were yeah is it's really interesting it's like Wall Street gives you so many very literal examples where you can actually put numbers on the
degree to which this is true like to give you some examples like you look at these closed in funds that either trade to premiums or discounts to nav um and like um you know the the the the the dream what's it called the what's what's the the fund that holds like a bunch of SpaceX and stripe and [ __ ] uh that trades at some massive premium oh that
would no no no this not that are private companies oh private fun that somehow acquires shares of all these private companies no I I I don't know about that one that's uh mat Matt L talks about this a lot but like the summary is this like you have this fund it owns all these privately held um Tech startups that are not like it's not
2021 anymore but they're still desirable um things like stripe and SpaceX is the big one right it's like people will pay you a premium to be able to say at the golf course oh I own some SpaceX right right so sure sure um yeah you put a price on that um and so it it acquires shares of all these Tech startups and so
it lists and it trades it's some stupid premium to nav that is actually like harmful at this point where it's like yeah having a small premium is fine but if the premium is the majority of the price you are paying then you only paying a you're only buying a bet on the premium going up or down right it's like
the degree to which you will make money on this investment has nothing to do with how SpaceX performs it has everything to do with like how people feel like this like weird bet is going um the converse to that would be like the you know the the bill akman uh uh uh story of like we're going to do ping Square us say it's going to trade to a
premium everybody I'm going to raise 10 billion and then it was 40 billion and then it was like 1 billion and I it's nothing right um where he's like well I'm I'm Bill acman and I'm a I'm a great investor and I would like to go buy things I would like to go buy public publicly listed companies and because
I'm Bill acman and because I have a lot of Twitter followers uh it will add a lot of value and therefore we feel like it should trade at a premium to Na and like there is a period of time where people were like yeah until you know it became the the the keep it Le stupid answer to the question made itself obvious which is like you can see which
companies they're publicly trained companies why would anyone pay a premium for this right what do you think we're morons um it's like there wasn't enough mystery to it right it's like the mystery was basically restricted to him saying I really want to be able to tweet about these companies more and I can't under my f current fund structure but if
I can make this fun then I'll be allowed to tweet more and I'm good at Twitter therefore there's premium here right was more or less one one of the one of the cases being made it's like there's no mystery about what Bill amman's tweets are right it's like tweet enough if you tweeted less maybe you would have gotten
your fund maybe you would have raised the money but you know not the first time in history that that mechanic has played out so is it almost like a barbell like when people uh ask me you know what should for asset allocation advice right I'm like what what should you do well I I think what you should do is buy the
cheapest all World ETF and just hold it like literally um Andor if you if you want to be very different than the market like the portfolios that that I design but there's going to be mystery and fun in in those because you have no idea what's going to happen and then you and so on one end of the bar all are the are the
mystery right like the fund holding all those private I love that idea by the way I'm going to look further into that um uh so there's that the the mystery and nobody knows how it gets done now also in that category would be our friend birdie maid off uh but then the other end of the barbell is like the I
can't remember which you probably read it too I think it was in the journal or the New York Times about the the pension fund maybe Nevada Bo oh where's one guy one guy index funds and top percentile and okay so this is this is what's so great about like there being 50 states is like yeah you get one state that's just like one
guy who like gets up in the morning makes some coffee and like buys more spy yeah I also I like I don't know the first thing about how you actually do like how you actually like do Capital allocation like from a funds point of view it's like yeah I'm sure there's all this [ __ ] around like oh there's this much withdrawal commitments per year and
this and that and you have to do all I don't know any of that [ __ ] Works actually right what I do know is that like if you measure all of these funds they all underperform the S&P and a lot of stories get told that's why they can't just buy theb and so it's like it's really nice to have one right to serve as the
counterfactual um just to make him sweat a little bit you know um yeah I wonder like I really wonder sometimes the degree to which like so okay something really interesting is that Canada has a different flavor of that phenomenon which is our Pension funds directly buying these assets right without going through a layer or two as
you know and that in turn makes a different category of people kind of frustrated which is like why aren't our services needed here why doesn't Canada understand that you need people packaging these products it's like I don't know man they just decided to buy the windmills directly right they're big and they can do that
um and you know like it it it it it it seems to work for us um I think it leads to a lot of it leads to like what I don't really know you probably actually have a much better sense than I do is the degree to which is like yeah like if you're looking after a public pension or something like that you reasonably need
to do things like diversification of like yeah if our economy is in the [ __ ] it's good for some other country to own our toll roads and vice versa like you get that geographical stuff but it leads to a lot of sort of like everyday complaints of people driving on the toll roads like Highway 47 and Toronto being like ah I can't believe
argentinians getting 20 more of my dollars or whatever is there like again and that sentiment is actually a genuinely important input into like what is actually politically possible in terms of like when the tough choices are made to how to do things in the either public or quasi public uh um obligation
pool right I.E like hey are we actually doing right by all of our our engineers and our diares um so like the degree to which you're like not only are we going to sell off all these things we're then going to go buy a bunch of stuff that is surprising you know we're gonna we're gonna buy maximum surprise uh I guess the Quebec pension
did that when they bought a bunch of uh um what's it called not not uh not Sam bankman freed but like the other one I those guys I think did like two different big crypto scams from what I recall uh they they there's some someone there has like really learned the lesson of like the best way to be successful in your career is to lose a billion
dollars you know well just like me yeah John Merryweather uh did kind of a hattrick there he was a long-term capital thing and then like I remember saying to a friend well this guy's never going to be able to raise money again fun in two days oh yeah yeah well this is intriguing to me because the the thread today that I want
to continue to pursue is this idea of mystery surprise equaling margin right sure so if you were Consulting I you know a startup of any variety right what what what what would be your strategy How would how would they do like you know Lulu misery yeah okay so I like her stuff because she consistently surprises me with she she's she's our boss now
yeah really yeah she's on her board yeah she's on Shop's board now okay well good you can ask her for them that's right because you're you're a big shot up at Spotify anyway that's right mus so so right exactly so how would you you're now you're putting your consultant hat on given what we've just gone over what we talked
about and let's say that you've got um how how would you have marketed that disastrous AI wearable what do they even call it I I I've blankit so which which one the human one or the friend that one that one that one because I bought one because I love all things theyi uh I gave it to one of my grandchildren and said well you know
have fun if you can use it but but but but walk me through how could they have done things better in terms of the theme and thread of mystery and surprise well I I feel like we got that answered for us with the friend.com launch you saw you saw that I I I trust I did I did I order order yes yeah yeah not only
is it this just great premise which is like we don't make you more we don't make you more efficient in any way whatsoever we're just your friend and we text you and say hi like all right that's already funny and compelling but then like but the thing that made it actually work is everybody getting mad
on the internet being like you raised $25 million and then you spent $2 million of it on friend.com what an incredible waste of money it's like no that's genius right like I cannot think of a better use of this money like if you tried to spend money to be the main character on Twitter for two days how much money do you think it would cost
more than that you get friend.com Dom more than that yeah yeah it's like and you also have this nice domain D that you can probably sell for like decent uh recovery value um yeah like I gu a part of this like I think there's the the you know in in the pral sort of like product managers and paste sort of discussion of
like are you selling something very concrete to the user which is like look at the value that you are getting which we are going to spell out in very understandable bullet points right like here is the pain points we're soling you and here is how much money it's costing you and here is how much you earn by using our product and then there's the
counter thing which is like this product feels nice it is aesthetically beautiful you like it for reasons you have a hard time putting your finger on you just do um a lot of the really high leverage um products in the large sense uh have that second characteristic of like I like it because it's fun and aesthetically nice
to use Toby cares about this a lot with shopy product and that is informed not from Best Practices on how to make SAS products but more from Best Practices on how to write programming languages it's like the really really really great programming languages which are you know some of the highest leverage things
we've built today um are it's like yeah like the main thing they care about here is sort of like developer ergonomics and like what are the ways in which they feel delightful to use and then what are costs that they incur in order to get you those feelings of that that delightful use case in other ways right so idea of
ergonomics is one way you can describe it Aesthetics is another way to describe it and really it's like again this sort of comes down to like there are a handful of people on Twitter who are just like really good at hammering home this beat like Shay Taylor um uh one of these people who's like yeah like the great thing about Silicon Valley is also
the great thing that sort of holds it back in these powerful ways which is that it's a bunch of nerds that don't understand Aesthetics except for a handful of them really do understand Aesthetics and then they win um you know yeah it's the Steve Jobs calligraphy story whether again it's it's one of
those stories where it's like whether that story actually happened or not it's like do matter like it's true now like now it's part of the Canon right it's part of the lore right like the fact that he was a calligraphy student in Oregon is like essential to the development of like oh no like every line inside the map has to be like a
brush stroke and like everything like you know why they needed to do the the the the the the Lisa I don't know my Apple history as well as I should but just this idea which is like oh yeah like everything that made it special was everything that was the exact mirror space of like here are the benefits you're going to get that are sort of
spelled out in very legible relief right the things that are illegible are the things you actually want because there's mystery in them right it's like there is Mystery in terms of like what is it that you want right and why do I want it right that like the minute that you sort of make it really really legible you
kind of you know you you you'd sort of like wreck a lot of it I don't know you know as I listen to you I'm thinking of Howard Bloom's book on how to reinvent capitalism and I'm thinking about my friend Rory Southerland uh and and they kind of have the same message which is if you really want to supercharge
anything right that you're trying to sell if you're if you're trying to sell something what you really ought to address is not the like the old school when advertising began right it was basically a block of text here are the benefits for this product and then it would be just bullet I mean literally looks like a tombstone of text yeah and
features and features right and and and both of both Rory and and Howard Bloom would argue no no no no no what you got to do is you have to address feelings because that's the entire game the entire game is going to be through addressing feelings now I don't entirely agree with that obviously Quant that I am but like what do you think about that
well okay so there is this really there's this really great Summit talk this is Cha's annual conference that Toby did several years ago where he says like hey like what is it that people in the video game industry really understand that other people in the business world don't understand and so he he frames he sort of inverts the
problem like this he's like imagine if a bunch of SAS companies tried to make Mario Brothers what would happen how would they do it it's like well they would get a bunch of people together and they would do their user research and they would figure out their problem which is the problem is that the princess needs to be rescued from the
castle right so we're going to go build a product we're going to like do a lot of like a lot of efficiency and a lot of figure out a lot of flows we're going to take all of the friction out of the product because nobody likes friction right friction is bad and at the end what you get is a single Windows XP
dialogue button that says rescue princess okay then you're like there we go right we sh the product it's like okay why is this absurd right why is this you know why is this so obviously you know like funny in this video game example it's like well if like it's like from the point of view of a game it's like the product is everything that
leads until the button where you rescue the princess right it's not just like the it's like the product itself is the journey there right and the challenge of you learning how to play this game and learning what a Goomba is and learning how to jump over it and like the feeling of you doing it yourself is actually
what you're paying right and it is this flies sort of directly in the face of this sort of very simple maxim of like friction is bad get rid of the friction if you get rid of the friction more then the utility of the objective is even more Salient and then people will want it's like no actually like there's something really important in the F like
if the purpose of the product is just to deliver you some result then it's like yeah that approach can works fine but if the real purpose of the product is kind of to change you as the user as like for you to feel that you are learning a skill or developing a certain aptitude or developing a certain characteristic
of yourself that's like no no no like learning how to play the game is actually like the entire product and like you overcoming the friction and you doing everything is like that that's where all the joy is and something really interesting is like there are a handful of sort of contemporary products that all have shared this characteristic
of when they're really early and they're really glitchy and hard to use is when users love them the most right and so like if you think about early Snapchat or actually in a Sly different way um early web 3 right where it's like oh using this thing was awful right it was like just like you like the web the the
the UI of just connecting your wallet and like claiming a token or whatever this is the most miserable thing but also people are like relentlessly addicted to it and they love it because it's a challenge that they've learned how to do right and inevitably what happens as you try to grow these products as you try to grow these user
bases you end up optimizing for getting rid of all of those things as the product matures and becom more real and all the glitches around out in it and it's like yeah you more successfully achieve the outcome that the product does but at the cost of all the joy of using it and if people were primarily using it for the joy then it's like
guess what they're going to move on right they're going to move on to something else right they were never actually out for the thing that you thought the thing was solving they were out for like a certain kind of like entertainment and story and feeling of accomplishment and like feeling of like I did this um so there's something
really in there where it's like you sew the seeds of your failure by making by fixing your bugs you know is like it's really yeah there's no obvious answer to what to do it's like okay so do you leave the bugs in it's like no not exactly like but you need to know what your product is and and why people are
deriving their their juice from it you know on a on a regular basis that's really scarily close to what I am looking at right now and we're looking at a particular I wouldn't even call it a product but a more of a platform in which like all of the things you just mentioned have to be present right so for example if you could go to a
platform where you could get surprised by whatever new content is there I hate that word content but I can't come up with a better word for it yet but the ability to get engage people through puzzles through learning through experimentation but it absolutely has to be fun if it's not fun then right like I
it's like trying to trying to come up with new ways to teach grade schoolers math yeah right we've seen a bunch of companies some of them that we were quite intrigued by um and and they involve like teaching kids things in a new way and and the thing that I continued to come back to which is the reason for this other idea that we're
working on is like how boring can you make this right so so if it was the intention in America and to a lesser extent in Canada when we formed our Educational Systems it was industrialists saying to the state no no no what we want what we want is them to be acclimatized to sitting in a room for eight hours following instructions right
right so that might have worked for the industrial era we need a whole new way of teaching people today and I think it's my opinion I'm usually wrong as you know so but it's my opinion that we have to we have to engage fun we have to make it entertaining as well yeah I mean so the the distillation of all of I think the
well-intentioned and constructive theory that you can can say about like how do you get people to develop agency in the world and like grow out to be useful members is literally like make things right it's really really just like the act of like when you make something right all of the really hard to describe
but necessary parts of challenging people are distilled into instructions that are not hard to follow it's like hey start with nothing make something right and it's like what happens to you and then what happens to you as a result right is really constructive right this idea of like hey what are like are you
making something in the world that you are proud of right that feels like a gift that you're making to the world right because you've put in all the loving care into the details that people will never see and because you know like you have all this emotional attachment into this particular process that you did in order to make it good like to me
like my my my sort of personal example in my life that I always think back to is when I was you know in the band and we were making music and recording albums and it's like you're making art right and you're making it right it's like you're not making a PowerPoint presentation about the art right you
have to make the art um and that process and this just an unbelievable level of depth that goes into the process of like turns out that like fractally within the challenge of make an album is the equally difficult challenge of how do you put a mic on a snare drum right turns out that challenge contains just as much challenge as the parent
challenge right and it Frac ofely goes to Infinity down below it right how do you get a snare drum did not not sound like [ __ ] on a recording is actually really hard um and from a process of teaching people like Hey how do you interact with this challenge in general it's like there's no substitute for make stuff yeah
H so I'm happy you said that because that is part of like as I'm as I'm writing about this to think about it um one of the things that I jotted down is you have to allow users to make stuff in a variety of categories right and and the engagement comes I I think that many people uh I love the the comment about agency right like how do you make a high
agency person yeah yeah you make a high agency per uh person by giving them challenges and puzzles and everything that that engage them and that they actually execute against right I guess my contention if I were to try to steal man your argument a little bit which is that like puzzle like I'm skeptical about puzzles in the
sense that doing a puzzle is not the same thing as making something um doing a puzzle can often feel like work but actually be fake work um it's like not to say that there's no value in them I love doing a cross word I think they're they're they're like a cross word can be great I think there's there's an
overwhelming amount of evidence that for example doing crosswords is great at every year of your life um but I don't think it's quite the same thing as making something um it's worth unpacking the difference there um I think like let me let me give you let me give you an idea an idea on something R rip like so
if it was books would making something apply to fanw written fiction oh yeah like if you're actually writing it and it's actually a real like so I I think there's a huge difference between writing a fan sick book versus writing fan sick like comments right it's like to actually make something requires you to go through the process of like hating it
and like refactoring it and like feeling that you're bad at doing it and like you know all of the essential steps of sort of the the creative act which involves you know the requisite amount of self-loathing and the requisite amount of you know having to go on the Journey of realizing that at the bottom of the
trough you actually open up all the possibility and all the good stuff right um I think the and that's not to say that longer equals better it's just like it is more often correlated with you actually going through the hard work B um burn Hobart the you know of newsletter of Fame had a has a good observation about this uh and
I actually observed this as well with my newsletter back in the day which is there's a pretty direct correlation between how many people read any given newsletter issue and how long it is and the correlation is not the shorter the more it's the longer the right the longer the piece is the more people read it and you're like wait a minute it
flies against everything I've heard about how what we want is short form content and our uh our um our expectations are for shorter shorter short it's like well what we actually want is things that are good right and things that are long are more likely to be good because it's more likely you went through the bru right of having to
make it right it's like not the mileage may vary but like for the most part that relationship is going to hold true I think um so um if you go back to this idea of like how do you get people into the habit of doing that thing a lot of it is like you know if if you look at um crafts and disciplines that have really
really good um Traditions to them so like engineering being one of the Hallmark examples of like you know the tradition of engineering is all the stuff that works for a reason um another one is sort of like the tradition of designers right it's like all these people have this sort of common element of like what is your portfolio right
show us your portfolio of things that you have made right that you regularly revisit and that you can send to somebody if somebody says hey what what have you made you can send somebody an email that contains links to 10 things you made right like it really does not matter what those things are what matters is that you have it in a form
and like again if the thing you're sending is like really good PowerPoint decks it's like I'm not saying that's impossible it it is it is totally possible possible that you can make something that takes the form of like what would mostly be sort of like analysis or deliberation like I don't know there exists somewhere some slide
deck probably on actual like adhesive slides that was like um John Malone inventing IA right um right you know it's like okay if that counts as something you made right and it probably appeared in the form of PowerPoint deck before PowerPoint right but like still you may that right a lot of a lot of real you know like work went into being
like we're going to make a thing and now we have it and like and it's good um like yes that counts as a thing you made but like most often you know like it it's going to be somewhat more tangible so what would you do if let let's put it into something that is more in your vernacular like somebody comes to you at
Shopify and you think oh okay this they seem to have really great products uh they seem to be differentiated it up uh like take us through like if there are two of those companies selling pretty much identical merchandise what are the characteristics of the one who sells a [ __ ] done and what are the character and obviously no
names what are the characteristics of thean who just even though they're selling the same stuff just don't don't engage they they don't get a foothold yeah okay so ah we we get to do this thing which we always do in every episode of infinite Loops which is to bring it back to the original topic of
uh margin is Mystery right so again in in in e-commerce e e-commerce sort of a e-commerce is Commerce except for CAC is rent right like instead of paying like when when you run a storefront business right one of the main variables is under your control is like where do you set up the store right do you set at
the store in the place that has tons of foot tra traffic and is expensive rent or do you put it like way out in some like abandoned lot because your customers absolutely need your product and they will drive 20 minutes for it so therefore you can pay nothing on rent or are you trying to figure out some sort of optimal thing in the Middle based on
particulars right so for e-commerce it's the same thing except for instead of foot traffic right it's like where am I putting my ads how am I thinking about where my ads go or like yeah how are you how are you generating people like discovering your product and finding your way to your store and buy right this is not the most surprising thing
you've ever heard and as a merchant more or less what you do is you're like okay I have my product and I sell my product for a gross margin let's say the gross margin is 40% or whatever and like that gives me a budget out of each you know sale to be like all right how am I allocating this budget right in order to
make the make make the bicycle stay up right as it travels you know you have a lot of um ways that you can think about doing this you can say like I'm GNA fling all of it at Facebook to do Instagram ads you can say Okay I want to do affiliate sales right where I can say like a bunch of affiliate you know I'm gonna I'm GNA have Jim go out and like
tweet about the product and they'll give him 10% off for every user that comes and uses code you know infinite Loops right like that's a thing you can do you can say I'm going to really develop a mailing list of first-party users and then from that mailing list I'm going to say here is 25% off because you're my
customer and that's how I spend that margin right like discounts on a product you know like is another huge source of like spending that margin right yeah ultimately if you look at the people that don't just s sell a lot of products but actually like have really sustainable businesses right it's like sustainable businesses are ones where
you're actually making a lot of money on the products you sell not just selling a lot of volume and like in order to do that it's like the main way that you sort of shoot yourself in the foot as a business is just to give everything away in the discount right give give everything away like in order to get
people in the door like whereas in contrast it's like the people who a lot of the businesses that really work are businesses that not to say that every business is a scarcity business or a Fein good business but like the invention of the flash sale right was a like remarkable discovery of like again like you think you think flash sales are
getting the friction out of Commerce no like you're making it harder for people to buy the sneakers that's why they buy them and why they pay full price for them right is just that little feeling of being squeezed in and being a little uncomfortable and they're being a bit of mystery as to whether you will get it or
not and being a bit of mystery in terms of how many people will show up right like a lot of again there there are some businesses like you know like retail and like sneakers and like fashion and things like that where you know flash selling is well understood and pretty much all that happens on Shopify but there is a much
larger in business that is for the most part not on Shopify which is the broader industry that looks like things like publication and ticketing and various kinds of selling either sort of like the rights to a place in line or the rights to a piece of copyrighted intellectual property or things where it's like you're not really selling a physical
thing right you are creating value and then arranging the value in such a way that people line up for it right like that is you know like one of the big areas of jobi will get to it eventually right but like just things things like things like you know Live Nation Ticket Master everybody's mad at them right it's like yeah you want to know why
people are mad at them because they make all the money and they make it in mysterious way right uh and the Mystery is not just them having a black box for like how do I get the ticket as opposed to a bot get the ticket it's because also there is a mystery of like rights agreements between like just in the case of a
concert it's like you have the record label you have the artist you have the like separate company that is contracted with selling the merch for the artist and the separate point of s system that has the exclusive rights to do that paying out the cut to the venue who then pay their cut to Live Nation who that's
like yo this world is so mysterious right and the people who actually live in this world right and really like I'll I'll plug one of my favorite App Partners this guy named Tommy who runs a company called single music right they're one of my favorite Shopify apps because it's like look their job is just to understand this murky blackbox
mysterious Cavern right and have the flashlight that they can take people around and be like hey do you want your business to be able to do X okay well we can help you do that and they can charge lots of money and they earn every amount of it right by just having like this virch saying like by using this you are
not going to have to spend all your margin on this thing because you're going to understand the mystery right and you're going to be able to play it's in this dark space and I think Sha's job is not to shine light on every single dark Cavern where money is being made it's like our job is more to just be like hey here is sort of this a common
stable platform on which various different people can build their ways of taking people through the dark caves and getting the mystery and helping you run your businesses such that if they ever have to interact together it just works right that's I think part of our our our job that we really try to do is try to
lower the cost of communicating across firms in the coast sense right such that more fascinating mysterious work can be done by small entities as opposed to large ones right that's really sort of like the work right the really great work is for small teams of creative motivated people to have access to mysterious margin right as opposed to
the only people who can capture it being big companies that's a good way of that um that oddly makes it given our normal conversation that oddly make sounds like an actionable item for me so I appreciate that well I want to ask you about this actually um which is like in the asset management world and this is
you know this is this world that has gone through a couple of different reinventions you know over your life right like how has sort of like the mystery relative to like the the the ultimate client or whoever whoever whoever is whoever is paying for this ultimately how has that mystery moved around and changed shape over your
career and who has been able to exploit it in its different forms you know from that that's a that's a great fund payment for order flow whatever that whatever you yeah all those words that people throw around yeah yeah it's really interesting because if you could invest what what what in or or come up with and explain well to potential
investors a new way of investing in the market for example I like my book what works on Wall Street literally made me right because what I did was I went huh you know everyone like when you listen to all these people talk about what kind of stocks they like they're always talking about yeah we like a stock that
has low PE ratio we like a stock that has you know the highest growth rates Etc I was always like wonder how that works over long periods of time um and so did the book for the first six months of oasi capital which was the first version of what became osaf all of our interest was inbound one of one of the guys who worked for me is
very funny and he said that one of my original employees was AR arguably the highest paid phone rep in the world because literally all the calls came in to us we raised about 600 million what after the book and that W that wasn't nothing back in the late 90s yeah I've always operated under the assumption if
you've got something right and you're there ahead of other people the only way that you can make sure that it's sustainable is you better have a competitor or two show up Rather quickly right so if they don't you're wrong and for whatever reason you you people were initially interested but it wasn't going to perpetuate so for
example if you can invest if you can invest or invent an asset class or what seems to be an asset class like for example I tried it with net folio Patrick my son actually brought it fruition at osam with canvas which is is p p you know personalized investing uh you know uh strategy or or done just for you right yeah so that worked because
all of a sudden you could have a portfolio that was truly unique to you right so you no longer had uh like ESG funds for example well with canvas you can do your ESG G you know Alex's ESG if you happen to like you know drugs sex and rock and roll we you get to pull yeah me too you get to pull the buttons
I always had a problem with the idea of the so-called ESG fund being somebody else's idea of what was a ethical investment right so but the thing that I always L Patrick for because it is critical I think you'll probably agree he was able to coming up with the term custom indexing he was able to take isn't it like when he walked into
my office with that I was just like active exactly exactly because he we what he did was he colonized already already deeply uh embedded in our cognitive awareness indexing and when we came up with canvas was about as popular as it could ever get then take the word custom and put it in front of its indexing just for Alex
well it's uh Everything is Everything is this B everything is positioning yes everything is positioning so it has changed in the regard to the those kind of things can get real legs if you're first in an ass a new asset class you can do super super well if you execute right but ultimately uh the way we always do Alex
we coming back to our original point in the conversation yeah the guys who do really well are end Tob the two and2 guys who are deeply mysterious and and and so there was a study done for example like when all the robo advisors came online uh everyone was saying well if you're logical this is what you're going
to do you're just going to do it because it's going to be the lowest cost in the world and you know you get a good Index Fund or whatever but the secret is once your wealth gets above a certain amount at the time of the study I'm familiar with it was like half a million dollars US sure even if you are the most doit yourself type of person you want
somebody else to be your wingman right you need somebody else or what for the most part unless you're an anomaly to to do that and that's how despite all of the ideas like you're probably just better off with an index fun right um it continues to be a massive industry honestly like just speaking for myself the single product that I would want and
if this exists tell me if it exists um that I would want most when people are talking about like AI right and like all all all the all the new language like GPT stuff and like what is it going to be useful for um to me it's like if when I when I look at all this I'm like okay like a lot of the a lot of these use
cases seem a bit suspect to me but the one that just doesn't the one where it's like I I buy that this is the most important thing in a long time is the ability for it to be a good teacher so it's saying like hey if you are learning a skill if you are putting in the hours how to make things right how to play the piano how to go make
anything or like which and and and you know how to be an investor is one of those things it's like the main thing that you really need is the ability to sort of like try things and get stuck and get yourself unstuck right and having a teacher who is infinitely patient with you right and non-judgmental right because it's you
know they don't it's you know it's it's like be just like I I really don't like all the use cases where it's like this is like a human but worse but not much worse it's like I'm zeros on all this what I'm more into is like what are the situations where it being not a human is better than it being a human and it
being non-judgmental is like the biggest one it doesn't get tired of you it doesn't judge you it doesn't get exasperated with you making the same mistake a bunch of times it's just helpful right and you know it's just helpful because it's just a thing running on your computer right that that is it's not a real person so it's like
yeah like the ability to say like you know I I I kind of like to tell people if people ever ask me they're like hey like should I own individual stocks or should I own index funds my general answer is like well you should basically own index funds but there's a notable exception here which is like the value of buying an individual stock is it
makes you get a [ __ ] about the stock and you might learn something right by really following it and seeing the thing go up or down and like like more more more things about the company surface in your like Google feed and it's like you it like it makes you take an interest into all these things that you wouldn't
otherwise know and it's like that's actually probably worth you know a tick or two of performance if you actually learn something in the process and it makes you better it up levels you and being way it's like yeah like your ability to supercharge that with having teachers sort of like embedded in your portfolio which is like hey like it's
like that really seems like an awesome product right where again the thing where it's like it is not promising better returns nor is it promising you like a cheaper but just as good version of something that a human would do it's just like look here's non-judgmental um not outcomes help but like process help right it's like man
like that's super super super super promising um I think a lot of that you just described many of the things that we are working on here at our little oy Adventures excellent sign me up when when it's available in Canada let me know and uh as you know we also invest in outside company so synthesis school is complete
AI for kids and kids are learning at rates that are ridiculous they are off the charts because the cesis has nailed the idea of they're non-judgmental they're infinitely patient and the kids cannot they just absolutely love using these programs yeah and and and you're also hitting a bit on one of my passions which is if you
want to help people learn things it's got to be fun and it also has to be or maybe wrong term fun yeah fun the right word yeah the same page yeah yeah yeah I I it has to feel real yes yes it's Gotta feel like oh this is this is going to keep my attention for a long time expense of realness is counterproductive which is a lot of what
people do when they gamify things totally agree yeah boy we could not be youten say we're going gy how to learn how toest we're going to game ofy no no no no no no no it has to be real where that person literally is like man I just learned a [ __ ] tun about and fill in the blank Alex it doesn't have to be about investing it can be
about any any other thing and your key element here that we have also agree with is the non-judgmental part yeah for example in my history as an asset manager like you could always tell if a husband and a wife we didn't deal with the end client very often uh but but in our early days we did right and when the
husband and the wife came in I would bet dollars to donuts and win virtually all of those bets the man does not want to admit that he doesn't know what kagar means the man will not uh admit that he doesn't I've been to a few of those in school but you know ex buddy I'm an expert on ker me too hdy don't worry but but especially the difference
between men and women here is really critical men will not admit that they don't know terms of art that you that are jargon that if you're good at what you do you shouldn't be using anyway way right but they will never admit it women on the other hand the white is always like uh what the [ __ ] are you talking
about man I I don't understand like can can you just explain this to me quite simply and the amount and of course it it's not always the man and the woman sometimes there's women who are also that way mileage may vary your mileage may vary but the point is if you can solve that problem yeah you have a massive massive thing on your hands oh
um I I think I texted you while this was happening but several months back we were in the process of buying life insurance which is like you know like I don't I I can't name a single product in the world where there's a bigger discrepancy between how good the product is and how awful it is described like here's a product that's
literally just like stop paying taxes that's a great product I love that product give me more uh but how it's sold is just miserable anyway uh point being is like so it's part of this process you know my wife is there yeah it's it's the usual sort of uncertainty of like do you know what you're doing here I'm like and then in the middle of
it they try to sell me some oasy funds it's real back right so I thought of you during this like go stay out of this so you know there's there's I I love that and you know we didn't get him sorry on on that note I I I ignored the first uh uh C pull from my producer but I'm going to have to pay attention to
the current one Alex as always like the Merchant properties and these conversations I'm putting them all in AI you well what I was just going to say it's like now we can actually finally get this done because you know like it's like in the old days you know like our our all three of our listeners would have had to have done that themselves
but this time just you get clo to do it and you know like a book great I look forward to it and again one of the one of the Privileges that you earn is that you get to incept more people more times than anyone else because you've been on more so you remember the exercise we're dubbing you the uh emperor of the world
you can't kill anyone you can't put them in re-education camps you can't do any of that but you can speak into the magic microphone two things everyone's gonna wake up the next morning and say I just had two of the best thoughts in the world I'm gonna act on them what you got um you know one thing that I was thinking about recently uh uh on exactly
this prompt was like if I could wave a magic wand and change one group of people's like attitudes about something uh like I think one that I'm currently thinking about is like get the green energy people to be more both curious and also Greatful about oil and gas um and I thinking this for a variety of
reasons it's one of those things where it's like yeah like okay it's like everybody seems to agree that like oil and gas got us here and they're very important and now we got to get off of them and how are we going to do it and it's like the fact that like a lot of these things have turned into ideological Purity tests uh is like
incredibly counterproductive right whereas starting with like oh man it is so cool that we managed to like actually pull off all this amazing infrastructure to get all of this you know like cheap fuel to do all this amazing things it's like that's the right starting point I think for figuring out like how we're
going to get this big transition happen you know as opposed to you know look at what's going on in that that's not even oil and gas look what's going on in Germany is just sort of like really tragic um and it's like okay how are we going to avoid that right like how is North America going to like really avoid that we have a whole bunch of advantages
but I think like it has to start with this sort of like mindset of sort of like not just appreciation but also sort of like genuine curiosity of like the fact that we pulled off within three generation a production and distribution system that result in you know this like thick oil from Venezuela being tiny
explosions in the cylinder of your car that makes it go down the street when you push a button with your foot or a pedal with your foot it's like that's insanely cool um and I I hate to see a lot of um stuff when it comes to electricity and batteries and all the next stuff turn into like a much more dumb down version of like man like the old
challenge is really good though it was fun that we did it and like maybe this one should be as interesting too um so that's my answer that's my answer for this time around I love it Alex as always it is a joy to talk to you hopefully next time around it will be less time in between conversations because we we have a we have a book that
we have a book that has to write itself here my friend that's right the mo the modern book deal it's like it's like you don't you don't get in advance to write the book it's like you've already paid for the gbt credits now you have toce all right all right Alex be you see you later I'm curious what your answer to
this would be but my favorite idea of the alive versus dead and growth versus postgrowth is this idea that startups are dangerous right young businesses full of all this explosive energy are really dangerous because it's very easy for them to say yes to things right it's like somebody's like hey we should do this thing and everybody's
like yeah sure right and then you do it it's like oh my God that's so dangerous right it's like it's dangerous because you're these people are idiots they don't know any of the cost they don't know any of the downsides they don't know anything about anything it's like the famous PayPal story where it's like
they didn't know what a chargeback was until like a year into making a business like yeah that's dangerous right because these companies can actually say yes to things and move right and then if you sort of contrast this to Big organization where it's like you know some question poses itself in front of
some leaders and in order to get to yes you have to get like 10 different stakeholders to all say yes to something andita what happens is you get nine yeses and one no and the one no is actually for principled good reasons so like what do you do here rarely is the answer to be increasingly convincing and change the no into into a yes what
actually happens is someone steps up and saying all right I'm going to do some leadership here I am staking my personal Social Capital on saying you need to disagree and commit and then if this turns out to have been a good course of action to take I earn my social capital back with interest right and if it turns
out to have been a poor decision to make then I lost that Capital right I spent it and I got no Roi on it and this act of sort of continuously Reen again the social capital takes the form in the company of Storytelling right like it exists as stories in people's minds and like you can draw on this sort of Toby talks about this a lot of saying like
the founder actually has this incredible reservoir of Storytelling Capital which gets replenished every time people tell the founding story of the company or people tell the founding story of like some product or some decision or whatever it's like that's what keeps this Capital alive and the thing is is that like having this capital is not
enough right it's like if people one day decide in the company it's like I don't really need to reinvest and restake this social capital on turning NOS into yeses I'm going to Simply Coast where I am that's when growth is over right that's when you can no longer turn those NOS into yeses and then it's like you are
what you are at that point right you can't do anything be meaningfully new or hard without that thing and it's very it's like it turns out that it co it sort of reverts back to the literal definition of a growth versus a value business right growth businesses are businesses that are able to reinvest all of the social capital that their Risk
Takers earn and if you're not doing that then growth is over right you're only worth the you know the the DCF of previous risks taken you know by people you know then you be that as it may anyway I completely agree I might use some of this in the Pod all right are you ready to go absolutely all right let's go for